Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The story of what has happened to women in Afghanistan, however, is a very important one, and fertile ground for fiction.
A story is like a moving train: no matter where you hop onboard, you are bound to reach your destination sooner or later.
It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime.
There's no excuse for the macro corruption, but Afghanistan was always an informal society with a weak central government.
There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry.
I think the emancipation of women in Afghanistan has to come from inside, through Afghans themselves, gradually, over time.
You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you have to see and feel.
Life goes on, unmindful of beginning, end…crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of kochis (nomads).
Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is... God help him.
I wanted to write about Afghanistan before the Soviet war because that is largely a forgotten period in modern Afghan history.
Her beauty was the talk of the valley.It skipped two generations of women in our family, but it sure didn't bypass you, Laila.
If there's a God out there, then i would hope he has more important things to attend to than my drinking scotch or eating pork.
People…shouldn’t be allowed to have new children if they’d already given away all their love to their old ones. It wasn’t fair.
I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had. But I didn’t.
When you have lived as long as I have, the div replied, you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same color.
yet love can move people to act in unexpected ways and move them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with startling heroism
I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.
Write the story you need to tell and want to read. It's impossible to know what others want, so don't waste time trying to guess.
I found a sad little fairy Beneath the shade of a paper tree. I know a sad little fairy Who was blown away by the wind one night.
The short of it is, as an aspiring writer, there is nothing as damaging to your credibility as saying that you don't like to read.
Whether you do something or decide to do nothing, either way, you are making a moral choice. And I hope people make the right one.
A man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn't like a mother's womb. It won't bleed. It won't stretch to make room for you.
If there was a God, he'd guide the winds, let them blow for me so that, with a tug of my string, I'd cut loose my pain, my longing.
At the time we are focusing our efforts primarily on building shelters for refugees. Homelessness in Afghanistan is a huge problem.
He had the blue kite in his hands; that was the first thing I saw. And I can't lie now and say my eyes didn't scan it for any rips.
There [in The Kite Runner] certainly are, as is always the case with fiction, autobiographical elements woven through the narrative.
Now, no matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft.
The country [Afghanistan] faces enormous problems. There is a violent insurgency hampering the rule of law and developmental efforts.
As far as I know, he never asked where she had been or why she had left and she never told. I guess some stories do not need telling.
and every day I thank [God] that I am alive, not because I fear death, but because my wife has a husband and my son is not an orphan.
On a high mountain I stood, And cried the name of Ali, Lion of God.O Ali, Lion of God, King of Men, Bring joy to our sorrowful hearts.
you say you have no courage, but i see it in you. what you did, the burden you agreed to shoulder, took courage. for that, i honor you.
I don't know what this feather means, the story of it, but I know it means he was thinking of me. For all these years. He remembered me.
My father and I did work for a while at the flea market and there really are rows of Afghans working there, some of whom I am related to.
Must have been quite the culture shock, going there.” “Yes it was.” Idris doesn’t say that the real culture shock has been in coming back.
I brought Hassan’s son from Afghanistan to America, lifting him from the certainty of turmoil and dropping him in a turmoil of uncertainty
In many parts of the world, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. But I think we need women to solve the problems that men create.
I have a particular disdain for Islamic extremism, and of course, in both 'The Kite Runner' and 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' that's obvious.
I finally had what I'd wantes all those years. Except now that I had it, i felt as empty as this unkempt pool I was dangling my legs into.
Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it.
Years later, I learned an English word for the creature that Assef was, a word for which a good Farsi equivalent does not exist: sociopath.
she held her breath, and in her head, counted seconds. She pretended that for each second she didn’t breathe, God would grant her another day
My own background is fairly liberal and so this notion of 'protecting women from outside intrusion' is not in my nature, nor in my upbringing.
You changed the subject." "From what?" "The empty-headed girls who think you're sexy." "You know." "Know what?" "That I only have eyes for you.
He is annoyed with their lack of interest, their blithe ignorance of the arbitrary genetic lottery that has granted them their privileged lives.
I felt on the periphery of high school culture; one of those invisible creatures that walk the campus. I think it was a lot worse for my parents.
My freshman year in college, I got a job working security. This was a high-tech building in Santa Clara, engineers coming in and out all the time.
James Parkinson. George Huntington. Robert Graves. John Down. Now this Lou Gehrig fellow of mine. How did men come to monopolize disease names too?
Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.
I was good at being a doctor; my patients liked me. At times people trust you with things they wouldn't tell their spouses. It was a real privilege.